feat(CDK Table): Able to inject row in cell

[keatkeat87]

Feature Description

The same feature request was made in 2019 but was rejected #15733.
Andrew Seguin did not explain why the Angular Material Team does not plan on supporting this case.
Over the past few years, Angular has changed a lot, so I am trying to ask again.

Use Case

I am trying to do a hover header to show all cell border effects, similar to the Google Ads table (as shown in the GIF above).

My idea is to create two directives (Row and Cell).
Row listens to mouse enter events and then queries all Cell instances to call Cell.showBorder(). However, I know that Angular query is based on the LView tree, not the DOM tree, so the Row can't query its Cells.

I tried another way, where Cell injects its Row. However, this also didn't work. After checking the code, I found that when CdkTable creates cell embedded view, it does not specify injector

This is the reason why Cell cannot inject Row.

I'm not sure if the new Angular team will change their attention, but I hope to at least get an explanation.

[andrewseguin]

Can you explain more about why you need any injection here? It's fairly trivial to set a border on row hover

tr:hover th {
  border: 1px solid black;
}

[keatkeat87]

Actually, it's a resizer bar, not just a border.

I'd like to encapsulate all the hover-related logic (showing and hiding the resizer) within the resizer component itself. This way, the table component remains clean and doesn't need hover handling if it doesn't have a resizer. In essence, if there's a table with a resizer, the resizer component will take care of the hover behavior, eliminating the need for additional logic in the table.

That's not something the Angular team absolutely needs to implement. We can hack it in many ways.
But, if the Angular team feels it wouldn't be much effort and it makes sense for td to inject tr, then I think you could consider it. It would make developers more flexible, especially for complex tables.

[wagnermaciel]

@andrewseguin I think this fell off your radar